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As we face a profound environmental crisis, we often think that it can be overcome by smart systems and green innovations, but this is risky since increasingly complex technological solutions rely on less abundant materials. A best-seller in France, this English language edition introduces readers to an alternative perspective on our technological future. The book skilfully goes against the grain to argue that 'high' technology will not solve global problems and envisages a different approach to manage our resources and build a more resilient and sustainable society.

The author of this book is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award-winning writer who attributes much of his success to living and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey for seventeen years. As a frequent monastic guest, he learned firsthand from the monks as they grew an incredibly successful portfolio of businesses. Service and selflessness are at the heart of the 1,500-year-old monastic tradition's remarkable business success. It is an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions. Combining vivid case studies from his thirty-year business career with intimate portraits of the monks at work, the author of this book shows how Trappist principles can be successfully applied to a variety of secular business settings and to our personal lives as well. The book demonstrates that monks and people like Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their high principles but because of them. It also introduces other “transformational organizations” that share the crucial monastic business strategies so critical for success.

Despite social and economic advances around the world, poverty and disease persist, exacerbated by the mounting challenges of climate change, natural disasters, political conflict, mass migration, and economic inequality. While governments commit to addressing these challenges, traditional public and philanthropic dollars are not enough. Here, innovative finance has shown a way forward: by borrowing techniques from the world of finance, we can raise capital for social investments today. Innovative finance has provided polio vaccines to children in the DRC, crop insurance to farmers in India, pay-as-you-go solar electricity to Kenyans, and affordable housing and transportation to New Yorkers. It has helped governmental, commercial, and philanthropic resources meet the needs of the poor and underserved and build a more sustainable and inclusive prosperity. Capital and the Common Good shows how market failure in one context can be solved with market solutions from another: an expert in securitization bundles future development aid into bonds to pay for vaccines today; an entrepreneur turns a mobile phone into an array of financial services for the unbanked; and policy makers adapt pay-for-success models from the world of infrastructure to human services like early childhood education, maternal health, and job training. Revisiting the successes and missteps of these efforts, Georgia Levenson Keohane argues that innovative finance is as much about incentives and sound decision-making as it is about money. When it works, innovative finance gives us the tools, motivation, and security to invest in our shared future.

Moral hazard—the tendency to change behavior when the cost of that behavior will be borne by others—is a particularly tricky question when considering health care. Kenneth J. Arrow's seminal 1963 paper on this topic (included in this volume) was one of the first to explore the implication of moral hazard for health care, and this book examines this issue in the context of contemporary American health care policy. Drawing on research from both the original RAND Health Insurance Experiment and personal research, including a 2008 Health Insurance Experiment in Oregon, the book presents compelling evidence that health insurance does indeed affect medical spending and encourages policy solutions that acknowledge and account for this.

This book examines the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility on improving labor standards in global supply chains. The book charts the development and effectiveness of corporate codes of conduct to ameliorate “sweatshop” conditions in global supply chains. This form of private voluntary regulation, spearheaded by Nike and Reebok, became necessary given the inability of third world countries to enforce their own laws and the absence of a global regulatory system for labor standards. Although private regulation programs have been adopted by other companies in many different industries, we know relatively little regarding the effectiveness of these programs because companies don't disclose information about their efforts and outcomes in regulating labor conditions in their supply chains. The book presents data from companies, multi-stakeholder institutions, and auditing firms in a comprehensive, investigative dive into the world of private voluntary regulation of labor conditions. The picture painted is wholistic and raw, but it considers several ways in which this private voluntary system can be improved to improve the lives of workers in global supply chains.

The fundamental distinction is made between the real economy and the financial. The financial economy came into existence to serve the real economy, but led by false neoclassical microeconomic theory, it has become predatory on the real economy. Rather than seeking to correct the false theorising, this book sets it aside in its entirety, focusing instead on practical realities. A Deming based systems analysis is provided of organisational systems, their individual components and their interactions with the social and ecological macro systems within which they operate. Those organisational systems serve the real economy which is recognised as having three distinct layers, each requiring a very different approach for their effective service. The social-infrastructural layer is a mandatory state responsibility, rather than being voluntary and competitive. The progressive-competitive layer, served largely by private for-profit organisations, depends on its competitive characteristics being protected and energised. The technological-revolutionary layer is best served by a collaborative involvement of both private and public organisational systems developing and applying new technologies to generate economic progression including the necessary sustainability revolution. Required actions are identified for that remaking of the real economy and escaping destruction by organised money. Appropriate measures of progression are proposed to replace the current orthodox measures such as GDP and its growth. Practitioner Notes provide examples of the practical realities of organisational systems in both the real and financial economies, demonstrating the inadequacy and falseness of neoclassical modelling and the destructiveness of its prime beneficiaries, organised money.

Austerity was presented as the antidote to sluggish economies, but it has had far-reaching effects on jobs and employment conditions. This book goes beyond a sole focus on public sector work and uniquely covers the impact of austerity on work across the private, public and voluntary spheres. The book begins with an introduction to some of the major debates concerning austerity, neoliberalism, and work. Austerity is viewed as a set of interwoven policies aimed at reducing public debt and expenditure, increasing consumer taxes and purportedly stimulating economic wellbeing through corporate tax cuts and support for private business. Since the 1970s, austerity policies have been closely associated with neoliberalism, a set of policies and processes that valorize the private-market as the solution to all social and economic problems and seek to reduce or eliminate social entitlements and public provision. Drawing on a range of perspectives, the book engages with the major debates surrounding austerity and neoliberalism, providing grounded analysis of the everyday experience of work and employment.